Why Apple's iTV (or Whatever It Will Be) Will Fail

NEW YORK (TheStreet) -- A Forrester Research analyst made news on Thursday for saying something I have been writing about for months regarding Apple's(AAPL) forthcoming iTV or whatever the heck it's going to be.

Frankly, without the ability to access Steve Jobs, I am not sure Tim Cook even knows what it's going to be.

Here's what Forrester's James McQuivey had to say on his blog :

Let's be clear what the company is up against in its long-rumored interest in the TV business. The reason it has failed with the Apple TV so far is not that it hasn't tried. It's that the TV business is a tough nut to crack: Content is still controlled by monopolists unlikely to give Apple the keys to their content archives. And simply introducing a new display on which to watch that content as it is currently delivered by existing distributors won't offer consumers much that's new.

Spot on. I said pretty much the same thing on TheStreet last month :

While Apple strong-armed the music industry into doing exactly what it wanted . . . that act will not fly with the TV and movie guys. Apple pulls sway with wireless carriers to subsidize the living heck out of iPhone because it operates from a position of massive strength in that relationship. It might even be able to take cable and satellite companies to the cleaners to subsidize iTV. When you look to the owners of premium content, however, Apple is really not all that different than Netflix(NFLX) .

We agree on the basic premise: Apple has had and will continue to have trouble striking deals with content providers. At best, if it plans on merely beaming content through a nice-looking television set, it will have an incomplete, and not all that compelling, offering.